This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related articles  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Pulmonary Diseases, Other  • Statistics and Research Methods  • Occupational and Environmental Medicine  • Cardiovascular Disease/ Myocardial Infarction  • Alert me on articles by topic

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: Dr Dominici and colleagues¹ provided evidence of significant adverse health effects that can occur from exposure to air pollution with ambient levels of fine particles (particulate matter of 2.5 µm in aerodynamic diameter [PM_2.5]) in a large nationwide sample of older adults. The breadth and size of their Medicare study population, and the recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposal for new legal limits for this air pollutant,² raise a time-critical question: can this same study population be used to further test the hypothesis that the EPA proposal to set a maximum daily exposure limit of 35 µg/m³ will be sufficient to eliminate these adverse health effects? It would be highly informative if the authors could conduct subset analyses to test whether this newly proposed air pollution standard, if achieved, could actually eliminate the public health risk of excess hospital admissions from acute exposures to PM_2.5 air . . . [Full Text of this Article]

George D. Thurston, ScD
thurston@env.med.nyu.edu
New York University School of Medicine
Tuxedo

RELATED ARTICLES

Hospital Admissions and Fine Particulate Air Pollution
Paolo F. Ricci and Sorin R. Straja
JAMA. 2006;296(16):1966.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Hospital Admissions and Fine Particulate Air Pollution—Reply
Francesca Dominici, Roger D. Peng, Michelle L. Bell, Luu Pham, Aidan McDermott, Scott L. Zeger, and Jonathan M. Samet
JAMA. 2006;296(16):1966-1967.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Fine Particulate Air Pollution and Hospital Admission for Cardiovascular and Respiratory Diseases
Francesca Dominici, Roger D. Peng, Michelle L. Bell, Luu Pham, Aidan McDermott, Scott L. Zeger, and Jonathan M. Samet
JAMA. 2006;295(10):1127-1134.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT